Some of the local armies are a pretty shady lot. The UAE army is mostly non-Emirati; Colombians, Sudanese, Yemeni guns for hire. Generally speaking, in the Gulf states, unless you're in the Royal families, no one joins the army if they have to. When I was in Bahrain, the BDF was either Jordanians (crack troops really) or pot bellied Bahrainis who abandoned a desert exercise when they ran out of Pepsi. These days, Bahrain has shifted recruitment to more Sunni (ie Salafist) Syrians and Balochs from Pakistan, and naturalised them, to change the demographics of the island away from majority Shia (ISIS flags were seen being flown at one time in Hamed Town, which is a new town built for the police). Many of the Gulf states, even Saudi on the Eastern side, have substantive Shia populations. And the Shia are the downtrodden lot, treated like <deleted> at times. In these countries, you join the army if you can't get a noddy job with the government. But the Shia who join, and I've witnessed this, are regularly denied promotion. Very sectarian. I wouldn't trust them in Iran not to switch sides. Essentially the governments in the region buy off the populations with trinkets, with stability being a mirage.
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